Contests and Prizes

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Robots Can Make Music, but Can They Sing?

      by

      At an international competition called the A.I. Song Contest, tracks exploring the technology as a tool for music making revealed the potential — and the limitations.LONDON — For its first 30 seconds, the song “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a lilting pop tune, with a female voice singing over gentle piano. Then, everything starts to fracture, as twitchy beats and samples fuse with bizarre lyrics like “Do the cars come with push-ups?” and a robotic voice intertwines with the human sound.The transition is intended to evoke the song’s co-writer: artificial intelligence.“Listen to Your Body Choir,” which won this year’s A.I. Song Contest, was produced by M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., a California-based team of musicians, scholars and A.I. experts. They instructed machines to “continue” the melody and lyrics of “Daisy Bell,” Harry Dacre’s tune from 1892 that became, in 1961, the first to be sung using computer speech synthesis. The result in “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a track that sounds both human and machine-made.The A.I. Song Contest, which started last year and uses the Eurovision Song Contest’s format for inspiration, is an international competition exploring the use of A.I. in songwriting. After an online ceremony broadcast on Tuesday from Liège in Belgium, a judging panel led by the musician Imogen Heap and including academics, scientists and songwriters praised “Listen to Your Body Choir” for its “rich and creative use of A.I. throughout the song.”In a message for viewers of the online broadcast, read out by a member of M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., the A.I. used to produce the song said that it was “super stoked” to have been part of the winning team.The contest welcomed 38 entries from teams and individuals around the world working at the nexus of music and A.I., whether in music production, data science or both. They used deep-learning neural networks — computing systems that mimic the operations of a human brain — to analyze massive amounts of music data, identify patterns and generate drumbeats, melodies, chord sequences, lyrics and even vocals.The resulting songs included Dadabots’ unnerving 90-second sludgy punk thrash and Battery-operated’s vaporous electronic dance instrumental, made by a machine fed 13 years of trance music over 17 days. The lyrics to STHLM’s bleak Swedish folk lament for a dead dog were written using a text generator known for being able to create convincing fake news.While none of the songs are likely to break the Billboard Hot 100, the contest’s lineup offered an intriguing, wildly varied and oftentimes strange glimpse into the results of experimental human-A.I. collaboration in songwriting, and the potential for the technology to further influence the music industry.Karen van Dijk, who founded the A.I. Song Contest with the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, said that since artificial intelligence was already integrated into many aspects of daily life, the contest could start conversations about the technology and music, in her words, “to talk about what we want, what we don’t want, and how musicians feel about it.”Many millions of dollars in research is invested in artificial intelligence in the music industry, by niche start-ups and by branches of behemoth companies such as Google, Sony and Spotify. A.I. is already heavily influencing the way we discover music by curating streaming playlists based on a listener’s behavior, for example, while record labels use algorithms studying social media to identify rising stars.Using artificial intelligence to create music, however, is yet to fully hit the mainstream, and the song contest also demonstrated the technology’s limitations.While M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D. said that they had tried to capture the “soul” of their A.I. machines in “Listen to Your Body Choir,” only some of the audible sounds, and none of the vocals, were generated directly by artificial intelligence.“Robots can’t sing,” said Justin Shave, the creative director of the Australian music and technology company Uncanny Valley, which won last year’s A.I. Song Contest with their dance-pop song “Beautiful the World.”“I mean, they can,” he added, “but at the end of the day, it just sounds like a super-Auto-Tuned robotic voice.”Only a handful of entries to the A.I. Song Contest comprised purely of raw A.I. output, which has a distinctly misshapen, garbled sound, like a glitchy remix dunked underwater. In most cases, A.I. — informed by selected musical “data sets” — merely proposed song components that were then chosen from and performed, or at least finessed, by musicians. Many of the results wouldn’t sound out of place on a playlist among wholly human-made songs, like AIMCAT’s “I Feel the Wires,” which won the contest’s public vote.A.I. comes into its own when churning out an infinite stream of ideas, some of which a human may never have considered, for better or for worse. In a document accompanying their song in the competition, M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D. described how they worked with the technology both as a tool and as a collaborator with its own creative agency.That approach is what Shave called “the happy accident theorem.”“You can feed some things into an A.I. or machine-learning system and then what comes out actually sparks your own creativity,” he said. “You go, ‘Oh my god, I would never have thought of that!’ And then you riff on that idea.”“We’re raging with the machine,” he added, “not against it.”The musician Imogen Heap, left, who led the A.I. Song Contest’s judging panel, and Max Savage, a member of M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D, the team that won this year’s competition.via AI Song ContestHendrik Vincent Koops is a co-organizer of the A.I. Song Contest and a researcher and composer based in the Netherlands. In a video interview, he also talked of using the technology as an “idea generator” in his work. Even more exciting to him was the prospect of enabling people with little or no prior experience to write songs, leading to a much greater “democratization” of music making.“For some of the teams, it was their first time writing music,” Koops said, “and they told us the only way they could have done it was with A.I.”The A.I. composition company Amper already lets users of any ability quickly create and purchase royalty-free bespoke instrumentals as a kind of 21st-century music library. Another service, Jukebox, created by a company co-founded by Elon Musk, has used the technology to create multiple songs in the style of performers such as Frank Sinatra, Katy Perry and Elvis Presley that, while messy and nonsensical, are spookily evocative of the real thing.Songwriters can feel reassured that nobody interviewed for this article said that they believed A.I. would ever be able to fully replicate, much less replace, their work. Instead, the technology’s future in music lies in human hands, they said, as a tool perhaps as revolutionary as the electric guitar, synthesizer or sampler have been previously.Whether artificial intelligence can reflect the complex human emotions central to good songwriting is another question.One standout entry for Rujing Huang, an ethnomusicologist and member of the jury panel for the A.I. Song Contest, was by the South Korean team H:Ai:N, whose track is the ballad “Han,” named after a melancholic emotion closely associated with the history of the Korean Peninsula. Trained on influences as diverse as ancient poetry and K-pop, A.I. helped H:Ai:N craft a song intended to make listeners hear and understand a feeling.“Do I hear it?” said Huang. “I think I hear it. Which is very interesting. You hear very real emotions. But that’s kind of scary, too, at the same time.” More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Museum to Create a National Archives of Game Show History

      by

      The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y., will house the archives, which it hopes will include set pieces, audience tickets, press photos and other memorabilia.“Showcase Showdowns” and “Daily Doubles” of yesteryear will no longer be relegated to just reruns.A museum in Rochester, N.Y., announced on Wednesday that it would serve as the home of a first-of-its-kind National Archives of Game Show History to preserve artifacts and footage from programs like “Jeopardy!” “The Price Is Right” and “The $25,000 Pyramid.”The archives will be housed at the Strong National Museum of Play, which is undergoing an expansion that will add 90,000 square feet to its space and that it expects to be completed by 2023.Curators at the museum already have some ideas about what types of artifacts would make an ideal centerpiece and are asking for items from collectors.“The wheel from ‘Wheel of Fortune’ would be iconic,” Chris Bensch, the museum’s vice president for collections, said in an interview on Wednesday. The museum, he said, would gladly accept the letter board, along with a dress from the show’s famous letter-turner, Vanna White.Museum officials said there was a void of preservation groups dedicated to game shows. They represent a key aspect of television and cultural history in America, from the earliest panel shows and the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s to big-money mainstays of evening television.“It is something we feel uniquely qualified to do,” Mr. Bensch said of the museum, which opened in 1982.The archive’s creation is part of the broader expansion at the museum, which is being supported by a $60 million campaign. The cost of the archive is yet to be determined.Several marquee names have already lined up in support of the project, according to the museum, which said that the archive’s co-founders are Howard Blumenthal and Bob Boden, the producers of “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” and “Funny You Should Ask.”The museum, which is already home to the World Video Game Hall of Fame and the National Toy Hall of Fame, has found another key ally: Ken Jennings, the record-setting “Jeopardy!” champion.“There’s like a pleasant nostalgia to game shows for generations of Americans,” Mr. Jennings said in an interview on Wednesday.Calling the preservation effort overdue, Mr. Jennings said that people were starting to realize the importance of game shows the way they did with other great 20th century art forms like jazz and comic books.“I think it’s the game show’s turn,” he said.In a statement released through the museum, Wink Martindale, the veteran game show host, said there was a certain urgency to the preservation effort.“Without this initiative, many primary resources relating to these shows, as well as oral histories of their creators and talent, risked being lost forever,” he said.The museum, which welcomed nearly 600,000 visitors in 2019 before the pandemic, said it was seeking to acquire everything from set pieces and audience tickets to press photographs.“It deserves a place where it can be preserved, a place where scholars, media and the general public can access it,” Mr. Bensch said.The museum is not limiting its focus to those in front of the camera. Officials said contestants, television crews and audience members would play an important role in preserving the history of game shows.“There are so many significant folks who have shaped this industry over the years,” Mr. Bensch said. “They deserve a chance to tell their stories. We also have plans to do video oral histories with key people so we will capture their stories directly and share those with the world.”It seems the museum has a lead on an artifact.“If they want a necktie I lost on ‘Jeopardy!’ with,” Mr. Jennings said, “they’re happy to have it.” More

    • 63 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      How to Watch Eurovision 2021

      by

      Even in a normal year, the competition’s unique traditions can be confusing to newcomers. Here’s what you need to know.LONDON — The Eurovision Song Contest is the world’s biggest music competition: a fiercely competitive, always surprising, sometimes surreal Olympics of song. Broadcast live across the world, the competition has taken place since 1956, making it one of the longest running television shows of all time. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Move Over, RuPaul! Meet the Drag Kings

      by

      Tenderoni outside of a barbershop in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexThe Great ReadDrag Kings Are Ready to RuleThe blurring of gender boundaries has allowed for more freedom in online pageants — and soon, it’s hoped, back in the clubs.Tenderoni outside of a barbershop in the North Center neighborhood of Chicago.Credit…Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyMarch 4, 2021Updated 4:23 p.m. ETIt should not be a big hairy deal that a 32-year-old Chicago-based drag performer named Tenderoni will be vying in a virtual talent competition on Sunday, and yet it is truly a reason to wig out.The pageant is called Drag Queen of the Year 2021. But despite a penchant for lip-syncing to Missy Elliott, Tenderoni isn’t a drag queen. He’s a drag king, which, generally speaking means a performer born female, who takes the stage in men’s clothes. He is what was once called a “male impersonator,” penciled-on mustache, compressed chest and all.Tenderoni, his creator says, “is a mash-up of Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown, Prince, George Michael and Boy George.”It’s drag, it’s cosplay and, he hopes, it’s enough to win.While androgynous costume in this direction is hardly new — Marlene Dietrich famously set libidos afire in top hat and tuxedo in the 1930 movie classic “Morocco” — drag kings tend to be the lesser-exposed and underappreciated segment of drag. Casual fans who get their drag from TV or with a side of waffles at brunch, in fact, may never even have heard of this particular practice.“In the past, many of our audience members didn’t understand the concept of drag kings,” said Chad Kampe, a producer who has been staging popular drag brunches in Minneapolis since 2012. “We often got questions.”Chief among them: “What the heck is a drag king?”But now that drag has gone mainstream — the Season 13 premiere of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” on VH1 on Jan. 1 drew 1.3 million viewers, its highest-rated episode ever — performers who exaggerate and explore the tropes of manhood are getting a closer look.Although a king has not yet been featured on “Drag Race” (a trans man named Gottmik who performs in female drag has), drag kings at last are getting more exposure elsewhere, and surprisingly, the pandemic may have helped.The closing of bars and restaurants has hit most performers’ pocketbooks very hard, but the mandated move to online entertainment may have helped level the playing field.“Covid made everyone have to go digital,” said Tenderoni, who developed his act at Berlin, a club in Chicago. “That has made the audience for all kinds of drag so much bigger. I’ve done shows and heard, ‘I’m from Brazil,’ ‘I’m from London.’ It has opened the floodgates.”‘A Seat at the Table’The Drag Queen of the Year pageant takes such diversity as its mandate.“We’ve worked with trans men and trans women and drag kings and all these different kinds of performers our whole lives,” said Alaska 5000, 35, the “RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars” winner who founded the competition with a fellow drag queen, Lola LaCroix, in 2019.Why, they wondered one sleepless night flying home from a gig, shouldn’t such performers all compete against and celebrate each other? “Everyone has something to prove, and everyone brings so much,” Alaska 5000 said. “What they do isn’t just valid, it’s fierce.”To that end, Tenderoni will go up against seven other disparate drag artists — some bearded, burly and burlesque; some Jessica Rabbit curvaceous; some known for their lingerie-clad muscles — for the Drag Queen of the Year crown in a show to be seen on the Sessions Live platform.Whether he wins or not, it doesn’t really matter. “This gives us a seat at the table,” said Tenderoni, who started performing in drag less than five years ago. “Drag is a buffet. I don’t need to be the main course — I just want to be included.”By appearing that night, he will earn a spot in a brotherhood of drag kings that, under various names, has been around for centuries.Male mimics Vesta Tilley and Hetty King were widely celebrated on British music hall stages of the 19th century. Stormé DeLarverie, a Stonewall activist who preferred the term “male impersonator” to “drag king,” passed for a man while touring America with the Jewel Box Revue in the ’50s and ’60s.In the ’80s, the comedian and actress Lily Tomlin played Tommy Velour, a Las Vegas lounge lizard with more chest hair than talent. He lives on, in all his hirsute glory, on YouTube.In a June 2000 episode of “Sex and the City” titled “Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl…,” prim Charlotte York (Kristin Davis) is photographed in a mustache and a man’s suit, and her portrait is featured in a gallery show. The show used real drag kings, but only as background players.More recently, “Vida,” a Starz show about two Mexican-American sisters, featured the drag king Vico Suave, the creation of Vico Ortiz, a nonbinary actor. Tanya Saracho, the show’s creator, said she wanted to include drag kings in the cast because they’re an “underrepresented initiative” in queer entertainment. “The artistry is there,” she said, asking, “Why are they not part of the mainstream wave that’s happening right now with drag?”Twenty-five years ago, fans had to venture far beyond their living rooms to underground clubs late at night to see drag kings perform. In New York back then, that meant a watering hole like Flamingo East on Second Avenue, in an East Village much rougher than it is today.Murray Hill with barber Jack Khaimchayev, right at Model Barber in Brooklyn, N.Y.Credit…Isak Tiner for The New York TimesGoing for the clean close shave.Credit…Isak Tiner for The New York Times“Those early days in the clubs were electric, uncharted and riveting,” said Murray Hill, 49, a New York comedian known as the “hardest-working middle-aged man in show business” since his emergence as a young drag king in 1995. His earliest drag performance was as a “fat sweaty Elvis,” to use his words, at 2 a.m. on a Sunday at a party called Club Casanova at a venue called Cake on Avenue C. “It felt very underground,” he said.Mo B. Dick, 55, the drag king who ran Club Casanova before decamping for the West Coast in 2004, said that in that era, “it was more about drag king realness. You were passing as a male.” Kings were spirit-gumming their own hair clippings to their chins and chests in the name of entertainment. The illusion worked well enough, but such makeovers would be considered underwhelming today.Thanks to the special-effects-grade prosthetics and precision paint jobs seen on “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag performers of every stripe have had to up their game. “Now when folks go to their local drag bar, they expect to see what they saw on television,” said Mr. Kampe, the Minneapolis producer, which encourages artists “to continually invest in new looks.”Mr. Dick thinks standards have gone up. “These kids today, I’m pleased at how extraordinary they are,” he said. “Now, there’s more artistry and more makeup. Being a king is more ‘draggy.’ The showmanship is phenomenal.” At a good brunch, he noted, “Performers now go through three or four costume changes during a one-hour show.”A 2018 all-drag-kings tribute to the boy bands Backstreet Boys and ’NSync, held at a venue in Minneapolis called the Union Rooftop, was so popular that Mr. Kampe said he had to do six shows to meet the demand.Mr. Dick recently created a website, dragkinghistory.com, to help new audiences learn about the art form’s past. On Feb. 21, he celebrated veteran drag kings with an international online event called “Drag King Legends.” The pay-what-you-can show featured stalwart performers like Fudgie Frottage of San Francisco, Flarington King of Toronto and Ken Vegas of Washington, D.C. All have been drag kings for 25 years or more.Shades of Elvis: Mo B. Dick at home by the pool.Credit…Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesMo B. Dick wipes down a dirt bike at home.Credit…Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesMr. Hill, who is perhaps the RuPaul of drag kings, headlined the night. In the coming months, he will appear in roles on three high-profile TV series: Amy Schumer’s “Love, Beth” on Hulu, Bridget Everett’s “Somebody Somewhere” on HBO, and the American reboot of the British sitcom “This Country,” on which he will play a magician. “A regular character on TV is something I’ve wanted since I started over 25 years ago,” he said.Paul Feig, the producer-director of “Bridesmaids,” “Freaks and Geeks” and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” wrote in an email that “I’ve been a huge fan of Murray’s for a while. When Jenny Bicks and I sold ‘This Country’ to Fox, one of my first goals was to get him on it. I love talented people who have their own unique take on the world and will do whatever I can to get them opportunities to shine.”Most drag kings, though, are still fighting an uphill battle. “Kings are rising in popularity in many large American cities, but they aren’t provided with the same opportunities as queens,” Mr. Kampe said.Live shows often are booked by male promoters who may not appreciate drag king artistry. “Often, a show will feature a dozen queens and only one king,” Mr. Kampe said. “Drag kings face as much discrimination in the workplace as women, and they often earn less.”Another obstacle, as Mr. Dick noted, is that audiences “don’t necessarily see the comedy in a woman putting on a suit. Female masculinity is still scary to some people.” There’s less inherent theatricality and, up until now, less glitz to performing in male drag, too; plus, people are a lot more accustomed in everyday American life to seeing women in pants than men in skirts. “Doing a male character is so much harder than doing a female character,” Alaska 5000 said. “Men are just not as exciting to look at.”‘Reigning in the Darkness’But the most exciting drag kings are making do, spectacularly.Landon Cider, 39, a performer in Long Beach, Calif., for instance, was the first drag king to win an American reality competition when, in 2019, he took home the title of “America’s Next Drag Super Monster” on “Dragula,” a Netflix series that plays like a goth version of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Wearing horror-movie-grade makeup of his own design, Mr. Cider ate live spiders on one episode and dressed as a blood-splattered, axe-wielding tin man from Oz on another. He was the lone king to compete on the show, but he nailed it in all his gory glory.“We’ve been reigning in the darkness this entire time,” he said. “Now we have more light shining down on us. If audiences think they’re just getting a lesbian in their dad’s clothes, I take that as a challenge to show them.”An online pageant isn’t “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” But it’s not nothing.Wang Newton at The Norwood club in Manhattan.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesMr. Newton combs his mustache.Credit…Celeste Sloman for The New York Times“Seeing drag kings perform on these platforms and do well is another chip in the misogyny of the drag community,” said Hugo Grrrl, 29, a performer in New Zealand who in 2018 won a televised drag competition called “House of Drag.”Mr. Grrrl, who has gone from a self-described “mustachioed transvestite” to a trans man in the years since his win, said: “Audiences are learning that drag kinging is just as transformative and artistic and entertaining as drag queen art forms. They’re wearing just as much makeup, glitter and shapewear.”With names like Vigor Mortis, Spikey Van Dykey, Jack Rabid and Freddie Prinze Charming, the latest drag kings were being nurtured in out-of-the-way venues in cities around the world, ones not unlike those clubs of the ’90s. In New York, performance collectives like Brooklyn’s Switch ’N Play, led by the burlesque-inspired “sex symbol” K. James; Night Gowns, a series of events run by Sasha Velour, a “Drag Race” winner; and Cake Boys, out of Queens, have been fertile ground.Typically, younger performers blur whatever is left of gender lines. As Mr. Grrrl put it, “Right now, if you don’t have an ‘AFAB performer,’” — meaning a cisgender woman, trans man or nonbinary person dressed as a drag queen — “or a drag king in your lineup, you’re doing it wrong.” The future of drag, he said, “is going to be a big old mess and that’s a wonderful, glamorous, fantastic thing. We’re all finding new ways to spread joy through the power of sequins.”When Damien D’Luxe, a 34-year-old drag king in Minneapolis, takes the stage, he may mime a medley of “Hooked on a Feeling” and “Crocodile Rock” dressed as Captain Hook. But he does so wearing high-heeled boots and false eyelashes that Bianca Del Rio would kill for. He has been known to wear a powdered wig and floppy lace cuffs straight out of Falco’s 1986 MTV video for “Rock Me, Amadeus” while lip-syncing to “The Barber of Seville” in Italian.When you’re a drag king, it can take that much effort to get noticed.“More kings are recognizing that passing as a dude, although that takes a lot of work and dedication and talent, isn’t getting the spotlight,” Mr. Cider said. “The kingdom has evolved into vivid colors and costumes and headpieces and glitter because that’s how you stand out in a crowd.” Especially, he said, when you’re on a bill with a gag-worthy gaggle of 7-foot-tall drag queens.“We can’t compete in the Glamazon department,” said Wang Newton, 42, an Asian-American New York drag king who, in his act, tests the boundaries of political correctness while wrapped in vintage Vegas swagger. But that doesn’t mean drag kings can’t compete. “We’re not about death drops. We’re our own thing,” Mr. Newton said. “It’s a whole new bag and we can explore that now.”And an increasing number of performers are doing so.“I’m watching girls and performers of all genders who maybe five years ago would have gone into burlesque who now are seeing drag kinging as the ultimate art form,” Mr. Grrrl said. “It’s a very interesting space to be in. Masculinity is something that deserves to be made fun of.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Brayden Smith, Five-Time ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion, Dies at 24

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBrayden Smith, Five-Time ‘Jeopardy!’ Champion, Dies at 24The five-time “Jeopardy!” champion Brayden Smith died unexpectedly at 24, his mother said on Twitter on Friday.Credit…Jeopardy!Feb. 13, 2021, 5:44 p.m. ETBrayden Smith, a voracious reader and former captain of his high school quiz bowl team who became a five-time “Jeopardy!” champion on some of the last shows hosted by Alex Trebek, died on Feb. 5 in Las Vegas. He was 24.Mr. Smith’s death was confirmed in an online obituary. It did not list a cause of death. His mother, Deborah Smith, said on Twitter that her son had died “unexpectedly.”Mr. Smith, she said, had achieved a lifelong dream by winning “Jeopardy!” as a contestant on some of the final shows hosted by Mr. Trebek before Mr. Trebek died in November at age 80 after a battle with cancer.Over six shows, Mr. Smith won five times, earning $115,798 and the nickname Alex’s Last Great Champion, the obituary said. Mr. Smith said he had been looking forward to competing on the show’s Tournament of Champions against his “trivia idols.”“‘Jeopardy!’ is so much better than anything that I could have even imagined,” Mr. Smith said in a video released by “Jeopardy!” last month. “Every moment since I last was on the studio lot has been a moment that I’ve been wanting to get back on there.”Mr. Smith said on the video that he had been moved by Mr. Trebek’s perseverance on the show since Mr. Trebek’s announcement in March 2019 that he had learned he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer.“Now everybody knows that he is ailing, and to put on a brave face and go out there every day and continue to give America and the world some good cheer, especially this year, was really a testament to how great of a person he was,” Mr. Smith said.Mr. Trebek was clearly impressed with Mr. Smith’s knowledge of trivia, telling the other contestants after one of Mr. Smith’s wins that they had played well, but “you ran into Billy Buzz Saw — and he took no prisoners.”Brayden Andrew Smith was born in Henderson, Nev., on Sept. 6, 1996, the second of four sons of Scott and Deborah (Rudy) Smith.At Liberty High School in Henderson, he was a National Merit Scholar semifinalist and led the Quiz Bowl team to back-to-back state runner-up finishes. For his outstanding play, he earned a college scholarship.He graduated last year from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, with a degree in economics and had planned to become a lawyer in the federal government. He had recently served as an intern at the Cato Institute in Washington, researching criminal justice reform.“The JEOPARDY! family is heartbroken by the tragic loss of Brayden Smith,” the show said on Twitter. “He was kind, funny and absolutely brilliant.”Jack Begg contributed research.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Fanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFanny Waterman, Doyenne of the Leeds Piano Competition, Dies at 100A British pianist and teacher, she helped establish one of the world’s most important piano showcases and then presided over it for decades.Fanny Waterman in 2010. Convinced that Leeds, her native city, was worthy of an international piano competition, she pushed hard to establish one and served as its guiding force for more than half a century.Credit…Andy ManningDec. 26, 2020, 3:31 p.m. ETFanny Waterman, the British pianist and teacher who co-founded the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition and oversaw it as chairwoman and artistic director for more than five decades, died on Dec. 20 at a care home in Ilkley, Yorkshire. She was 100.Her death was announced by the Leeds competition.The idea of presenting an international music competition in 1960s Leeds, a gritty industrial city in northern England, seemed risky. But Ms. Waterman, a Leeds native who learned perseverance from her poor Russian immigrant father, believed in the vitality of her hometown and was certain she could draw support for the venture.“I dreamt it up one night, and I was so excited that I woke up my husband,” she said in a 2010 interview with The Jewish Chronicle. “He was born in London,” Ms. Waterman added, “and he said: ‘It won’t work in Leeds. It has to be in a capital city.’”But Ms. Waterman talked up the idea and raised funds from patrons, banks, businesses, the Leeds City Council and the University of Leeds. Her husband, Geoffrey de Keyser, a doctor, became a founder of the competition, along with her good friend Marion Harewood, a pianist who was then the Countess of Harewood (and was later married to the Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe). The two friends also wrote “Me and My Piano,” a series of piano lesson books that remain top sellers in Britain.From the start, Ms. Waterman conceived of the Leeds competition, which is held every three years, as a means to foster musical values she had cultivated as a performer and teacher, placing musicianship, artistry and sensitivity over technical bravura.Music is a “wonderful discipline,” she said in the 2010 interview. “You can’t play a note without thinking, how loud, how soft, how soon, how late. It makes you think carefully and it gives you judgment.”Over the years the competition joined the ranks of the world’s elite contests, including the Van Cliburn, Tchaikovsky and Chopin. Such competitions are major springboards for careers in music, often an obligatory stop on a young performer’s progress; they have also come in for criticism for quashing creativity and individuality.As with all competitions, the administrators of the Leeds contest point not just to the list of their outstanding winners — among them Michel Dalberto, Jon Kimura Parker, Ian Hobson and Alessio Bax — as proof of success in identifying young talent, but also to finalists who became major artists. That group of luminaries includes Mitsuko Uchida, Andras Schiff, Lars Vogt and Louis Lortie.The first Leeds competition took place in 1963, with the composer and conductor Arthur Bliss as chairman of an eminent jury. It was an immediate success, with 94 entrants from 23 countries, though with one potentially embarrassing result: The winner was one of Ms. Waterman’s students, Michael Roll, raising the perception of favoritism. Ms. Waterman later said that he had deserved to win, and that the judges had strongly supported him.Ms. Waterman backstage with the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, left foreground, and the pianist Murray Perahia, right foreground, in 1972, the year Mr. Perahia won the Leeds competition.Credit…Leeds International Piano CompetitionFor the third competition, in 1969, Ms. Waterman asserted herself after the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu placed fourth in the second round, which meant he would not advance to the finals. Deeply impressed by Mr. Lupu’s playing, Ms. Waterman insisted that the number of finalists be increased from three to five and vowed not to organize another competition unless he made the cut. She got her way, and Mr. Lupu wound up winning and went on to a distinguished career.The competition garnered wide attention in 1972 when the American pianist Murray Perahia, then 25, won first prize.In the last round, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the other two finalists, Craig Sheppard and Eugene Indjic, also Americans, played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, a work that many young pianists have used to prove their virtuosic mettle.Mr. Perahia, already an audience favorite from performances of works by Schumann, Mozart, Mendelssohn and others, instead chose to play Chopin’s intimate, elegantly brilliant Piano Concerto No. 1 in the finals. He prevailed despite suffering terrible anxiety under the pressure, earning a cash prize of $1,850 and numerous recital and concerto engagements.Ms. Waterman was born on March 22, 1920, in Leeds, the second child of Mary (Behrman) Waterman and Meyer Waterman (the family name was originally Wasserman). Her mother was an English-born daughter of Russian immigrant Jews. Her father, born in Ukraine, was a skilled jeweler.Though the family struggled financially, her parents came up with enough money to provide young Fanny with piano lessons once her talent became clear. She practiced on an old upright piano and studied with a local teacher, while her brother, Harry, took violin lessons.At 18, she became a scholarship student at the Royal College of Music in London, studying with Cyril Smith. She performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in 1941 with the Leeds Symphony Orchestra, the same year she met Dr. de Keyser, then a young medical student, whom she would marry in 1944. With the birth of her first child, Robert, in 1950, Ms. Waterman decided to devote herself to teaching.Robert de Keyser survives her, as do another son, Paul, a violin teacher, and six granddaughters. Her husband died in 2001.Once the Leeds Competition got going, Dr. de Keyser became intimately involved, both in recommending lists of repertory and in writing up rules. “He was a doctor, but his knowledge of music was second to nobody,” Ms. Waterman said in 2010.In 1966 Ms. Waterman and her husband bought Woodgarth, a magnificent eight-bedroom Victorian house in Oakwood, a suburb of Leeds. She kept two fine pianos in its spacious drawing room, where she taught, made plans for the competition and presided over lively musical soirees that included guests like the composer Benjamin Britten and the tenor Peter Pears, as well as Prime Minister Edward Heath. Ms. Waterman sold the house this year.She was appointed dame commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2005. In 2015, at 95, she retired from the Leeds Competition. Yet in an interview with the BBC five years later, she revealed that she had stepped aside unwillingly.“I think they were misguided,” she said of the unnamed people who wanted her out, “because I had many, many years more to give of my own passion, my own knowledge and everything.”Still, she expressed pride over her accomplishments. “I do hope and pray,” she said, “that in another 100 years our competition will have the reputation it’s got now.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More